Spiritually Transformed | A Path to Find True Freedom: Being Your Authentic Self | Radical Honesty

 As Human Beings we all search for meaning, and we all search for purpose. Becoming more spiritual means to find purpose and meaning. It means to get connected with a part of us that some of us identify with our souls, others with our conscience; to a part of us we all recognise as bigger than us.  Our consciousness equals to our sense of justice which is inherent to every Human Being regardless of their age. Our consciousness tells us that we are spiritual being, that there is a part of us which is unique to humans and it never fails.  In our search for purpose and meaning we need connection with ourselves. We need to feel our feelings to understand what is important for us, what gives us joy and pleasure, for example. In our search fur purpose and meaning we also need to feel connected to others.  Therefore to establish a true connection we need to apply one of the most important spiritual principles, which is honesty. We cannot connect with ourselves, our feelings...

The most debilitating ‘success blocking’ mental state is the fear of failure. I love playing tennis, it is my sport, I love the sound of the racket hitting the ball, the feel of the ball on the racket, the precision needed to place the ball where I want, the concentration needed to live in the moment, the fast motion of the legs, the slow motion of the toss of the ball when I serve. I love being in the zone, my higher self having fun; the rest, the world, people, places and things are in existent. There, on the court  it is only me, a ball, a net and a point to be made. One point at the time.  I love tennis, because it is me playing against myself, against my limits, against my fears, it is me who cries yes to life, who experiences the joy of success.  I was 14 when my father died, he died of a heart attack while I was at a tennis camp learning to become unbeatable. From that moment tennis became my enemy, it became my grief, my loss, it became my fear, my failure. It bec...

Every time we justify our behaviour we are acting out of Pride. Pride is a debilitating self defeating ego driven behaviour stopping us from growing spiritually (when we place ourselves above others by justifying our behaviours for example, or when we carry on believing, sometimes for years with disastrous results - see the compulsive obsessive behaviour of an addict for example whom despite the evidence of the contrary he still thinks he can control - or even stop - his drinking, or gambling or drug using -  that we can overcome a problem or achieve something with the only force or our self will) and that stops us from achieving what we most desire in life (regardless of what this is).  Pride will stop us from trying again when we do not get what we want at the first try, or will stop us from admitting defeat, pride will prevent us to see our true nature, will stop us to see our part in a controversy, or from searching inside ourselves to find the truth of our feelings or of ...

The million dollar questions! The questions everyone has have a simple answer.  And (even better)...it has the answer every human difficulties can be tackled with and overcome. Sometimes it is easier to answer a question by saying what the contrary to the question is.  So what does grind our self esteem, what does destroy our self esteem?   What is low self esteem?  A person with low self esteem acts like a dog trying to bite its tail.  Why? Because what activates low self esteem is fear.   And when we act from fear we go round and round in a circle and the more we act in fear the lower our self esteem becomes. Why? Well, because when we act out of fear we act dishonestly. And when we act dishonestly we lose our integrity.  Have you ever met a dishonest person who is successful? I haven’t.  The basis to love yourself unconditionally is being rigorously honest.   A lot of people here will argue over this, I bet, because there is a lot of misun...

Some people believe meditation is a very difficult practice to master.  They sit down with the best intention to meditate and as soon as a few thoughts come up in their conscious mind they start becoming nervous and start thinking that they cannot meditate, they are not able to stop the thinking and the harder they try the worse it gets. They convince themselves they never will be able to do it and it is just a big waste of time sitting down while they could do sort out their busy life.  They think they cannot control they thoughts because someone, sometimes, has told them that ‘being in meditation’ means being in absence of thoughts. Nothing more false (at the beginning and for a while). We want to became the master of our minds.  For every beginner, when they became more aware of the constant output of the mind (thoughts) there will be thousands and thousands of thoughts invading the conscious level. The fact is, the brain function is to create thoughts. Is is true that...

When I was growing up, for various reasons, including my dad death when I was 14, emotional pain like sadness and grief, was very present in my life. It was such an unbearable pain that automatically I was trying to avoid feeling it by running away from it.   So the pain, the grief and the sadness, became compressed inside me and grow bigger and bigger. My understanding is that when there is too much pain we cover it up with anger because we feel less vulnerable in feeling angry than in pain.   So I used anger as an addiction to avoid feeling the pain. The anger then transformed itself in self-defeating behaviours and the emotional pain was then growing bigger. But when I became aware of the trick I was using I decided to allow myself / to have the courage to feel the pain / the grief that was sitting below the anger.   To do so I had to cry but be careful the tears need to be of grief and sadness and not of self-pity, if I cry out of self pity I do not clean my soul from...

I speak and listen to a lot of people and I know that there is a common idea that rich people or wealthy people are somehow ‘bad’: egoists, do not care about others, greedy, etc…etc… Like all generalisations this is a generalisation :) and, as such, is a untrue statement. Every generalisation is untrue: each of us is different: in our approach to life, to money, to spirituality, to values.  In our own human fragility, we are all unique in the way we perceive reality. What I know though is that when we are struggling for survival, to get food on the plate, and to help and protect the people we love most, when we act out of desperation, we are more likely to act in ‘non-spiritual’ ways, because we have lost faith. When we act out of desperation we act out of fear, therefore we have lost faith.  [Desperation is not a nice place to be. Desperation comes from lack of faith in the fact that the Universe always provides, this is my understanding and my experience, if we look at the r...

Never took a certain action? Terrorised or just anxious to move forward? Do it once, it will be like lifting a big rock…do it again it will have less weight…do it again…and again…it will become normal and then move forward to another action you’ve never taken… Practice makes perfect! 

Sometimes we are fearful to be humble, to say the truth about ourselves, or admit a mistake we've made or a decision we've taken out of fear (decisions taken out of fear are essentially and intrinsically dishonest because fear, being it based on a false conviction, is a dishonest state of mind - mostly a projection on the future based on past events or experiences - what is it more untrue/dishonest than this?). Why are we so fearful to be humble, to make ourselves 'seen' from others? The reasons are multiples but all connected to an internal belief that if we become vulnerable, if we are honest expressing our feelings, our beliefs, our anger (this is a big one we want to hide at all costs) we will be disliked, rejected, judged, abandoned. It is exactly the contrary, the more true we are the more we are sure we are being loved from the people who likes us! The more exercise we make to be honest by becoming vulnerable the more we become connected with our true self (which...

I feel so grateful today, I’ve seen the world with the eyes of God, with the eyes of love and compassion and joy, with the eyes of empathy, with the eyes of wisdom; with the same eyes some others see the world so we can see the same and feel the same: the sense of the days becoming smaller and the little things becoming bigger, like the eyes of my brother today when he looked at me and we said goodbye, he looked like the little boy I played with, running to collect seashells, endlessly during the summers of our youth, with fake tattoos (recurrent gifts of our mother’s best friend) stamped in our harms and flat chests, fading tattoos with animals, sun rays, dolls, cars and all the rest: the monolithic hope in our hearts and the stupid children’s innocent certainty that things could only get better. I feel so grateful today. 

Why sometimes it feels so scary to be Honest? We are social beings and we need social interactions to survive. We feel we need to be appreciated and loved. Sometimes we try to ‘grab’ those things by forgetting our values, our truth, our integrity. By doing so we became even more dependant and weak. When we are dishonest because we feel that we will be disliked, unloved, abandoned, we are abandoning ourselves first.

FEAR: Fake Experience Appearing Real LOVE: Libertas Omnius (Rerum) Veritas Est Fear is lack of faith, generally connected with the lack of knowledge of the truth which is what gives us freedom. When we are free (we know the truth) we cannot be in fear because we are not fearful of the the truth, we are fearful of the actions we might have to take when we know the truth. So freedom comes from knowing the truth, freedom to choose, even if we decide to choose what we do not like, it does not matter because we have made a choice out of freedom (love) and not of fear.

Love is inside every individual and it is what expands our consciousness. I am not speaking about love but about LOVE which, in all capital letters, means a state of being. If we are not in LOVE, we are not in Fear. Fear prevents our consciousness to expand, Fear shouts down our awareness.  So the more fearful we became the less aware of what is happening we are. A terrible circle. The real fear we all have is of the responsibility that comes with knowledge, the real fear is to having to act based upon knowledge because this requires courage and we cannot have courage if we’ve lost hope. So the question is how to build hope in order to face our fears. [Look out for my post with the title: 'How to build hope]'. To be continued...

It is in our culture to learn to fight, we refer to children who have difficulties as: 'little soldier' and we praise them for being strong and facing abusive reality and accepting it (as injustice for example). When I have heard this way of saying for the first time I shivered inside.  A child behaving like a little soldier? A child who has learned to loose his vulnerability, who has built a facade and pretend everything is all right when inside he is crumbling? I felt so much pity for that little child.  We have been told to be strong, not to cry and face reality. We have been told that when we give up and we surrender we are losers, we have learned to fight and to win at all costs, our integrity included.  I am not saying that perseverance is a 'bad quality' I think perseverance is the only tool we have to reach our full potential as human beings, to move forward toward the unknown. Spiritual growth is painful, it is the most painful journey of humankind but after th...

When I was young - until I was around more or less 34 - I did not have any discipline. I would start something and if I did not have almost immediate results I would give it up, just to start something new. I have reflected on that behaviours (or habits of behaviour) several times and I realised a few reasons were the cause of my lack of discipline: 1. I could not find any pleasure in what I was doing. Why? Because I was not enjoying the process since the only reason I was starting something was to obtain a result, an end goal.  I was not going to play tennis to have fun but I was going to play tennis to reach a better level, I was not reading a book for knowledge in itself but to show off my knowledge, et etc… There was no one single thing I was doing for the simple pleasure of doing it in that moment only. I was acting projected in the future and refusing to enjoy my present.  2. I was always questioning my abilities and I was never happy with my capabilities of the moment. ...

When I did not know how to be free, or what freedom meant and how to obtain it (meaning following my wishes and desires, valuing my time, being able to say no when I felt so, speaking my truth) I was placing fake love above freedom. How is it? And what is the difference between true love and fake love? Is there something like fake love and how do we identify it within ourselves?  Fake Love: We exercise 'fake love' every time we think we ought to so something for someone else, or we ought to say something, or we ought to behave in a certain way, because we feel we own this 'something' to someone or because we are terrorised of asserting our needs (some people have behaved this was for so long they do not even recognise their needs anymore).  Every time we act in those ways we are exercising 'fake love'. What does fake love do to the person 'doing the fake love' and to others? TO THE PERSON DOING 'FAKE LOVE': it diminishes that person, his/her self...

We admire persons who act with integrity, meaning that they respect the words they say, they are honest and respect the promises they make. It is very difficult to act with integrity if we live in fear, fear of not being accepted, or not being liked, ultimately fear of not being loved, in this fear we forget our values and act dishonestly only because we are begging for love. This is common for a lot of people. How to move forward? How to overcame this paralysing  fear?  First of all we need to understand what we need, and to do so we need to give a name to our feelings.  Unfortunately one of the consequence of fear is that when we are in fear we loose awareness. We became less aware of our feelings, for example. So we have to find a way to remove the fear, to accept that even IF we will not be loved when we are ourselves or speak our truth (the idea of not being loved is a projection in the future a reflection of our thinking that creates the fear) we will survive. How t...

I studied Law and practised Law because I wanted Justice, sometimes I feel I studied Law because I wanted to know God, since the ideal of God is inherent in every human being.  The Law of God (Natural Law) is Justice, therefore Justice is God, and because Justice is Love, the consequence is that Love is God, and, since another word for God is the Truth [not because God is necessarily the Truth but because the Truth is definitely God - meaning that the Truth is fundamental to attain Freedom, and we cannot attain Freedom without Knowledge, Knowledge of the Truth] we need to have Knowledge of the Truth to be able to practice Justice. Therefore if God (knowledge of what is True) comes before Justice, Knowledge comes before Justice. So the question is, how to attain Knowledge? To attain Knowledge, knowledge of ourselves, we need to put in practice one spiritual principle called Courage, the Courage to accept the pain of the dissolving of the Ego through Humbleness.  So Humbleness c...

Which ones I have learned to follow to feel happy and fulfil my full potential? I am Italian and I bet there is not a more Catholic country than Italy in the world - apart from Ireland [and Nigeria, South America, etc, etc, etc...]. In Italy you are either Catholic or Agnostic or, even worse, an Atheist. I was born in the North of Italy, a small town called Trieste, a town which was part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire for over 450 years. A very catholic Empire indeed. My mother, my father and their parents were Atheist. Me, I was placed in a Catholic kindergarten (only because it was closer to home); as you see you do not need to be from a Catholic country to be a hypocrite (even if it helps) you just need to be a human being. [Apologies for the generalisations, which I do not like, the two above are necessary only because they help with the jokes :)] Going back to the kindergarten, which was obviously run by Catholic nuns who, generally (another generalisation, again!) are considere...

There are times in which we cannot find the love within us to do things and we would like to do things we love instead, but sometimes we have to do things for our kids or at work we rather not do, we feel we do not have a choice, but we have a choice and the choice is doing them with love, when we put love in our actions even if we do not feel the love we will love them. 

There are times in which we cannot get in contact with our emotions, our real feelings, we cannot name them and/or identify them. When we are in fear we lose awareness of our selves, in this situation the are buried under anger or fear, and/or we categorise them in a very simplistic way as 'happy' and 'sad'.  When I was growing up and I found it difficult to experience emotions, I could not make any decisions, since I did not know how I felt about a situation, if it would make me happy or not. I was paralysed.  Spiritual transformation is based on being honest with ourselves, for example accepting that we are in fear and we are too fearful to take action. We will then analyse  our fear and look at what sits below it. There is always. feeling we do not want to feel sitting under fear (or anger).   This will allow us to accept and recognise our feelings and by doing so will move us forward toward happiness and self-realisation. Welcome your feelings in your life, ...

Sometimes to grasp the value of my time I play a trick with my mind saying I have only 6 months left to live  - it could be true or it could be I have much less than this... So let’s say I will be dead 6 months after posting this post, at the end of March 2022. What I would like to accomplish (spiritually) by then?  A nice question to answer and helping setting spiritual goals to practice today. Life is a blessing. 

When I was younger, I remember criticising myself for each ‘negative’ or ‘critical’ or ‘judgmental’ thought I had with the conviction that if I had that thought I was a’ bad’ person. I’ve started regular meditation many years ago and for a couple of years or more, before lock-down, I was attending a Buddhist Centre in Holloway Road, London. I liked what the Buddha says about the function of the mind (not of the brain), which is to produce thoughts as much as the function of the heart is to pump oxygenated blood to the cells, and as much as each organ of the body has its own particular function. Therefore it is the mind that produces thoughts, not me. This understanding removed from me the conviction that ‘I am my thoughts’ and the negative connotation connected with it since every single human being in this planet has ‘negative thoughts’.  The real question is: “If I am not my thoughts who am I?” I am not even my body, since my consciousness comes only from my brain. Am I a spirit...

Being humble gets easily confused with being humiliated.  In today’s world, where in many occasions our public figure, the social platforms ‘facade’ has taken over our humanity and vulnerability, humbleness sounds like ‘a Bible preaching stuff’ or a ‘Jesus like’ behaviour that takes us nowhere and it is not even considered as an option. If we want to grow spiritually, we have to recognise that the reality is quite the opposite. For example,m if you speak or watch any sport star, let’s speak about Emma, for example, (I am sure lots of you know of whom I am taking about after the US Open 😀💕), she has deployed a lot of humbleness to be able, day after day, since she was a child to learn and improve her strokes, her serve, and make minimal changes day in and day out; she has to face her fears, work on her mental strength, to feel her fear of failure - which requires lots of humbleness to fail over and over again and needs to be firstly addressed (by failing over and over again and ac...

 The most precious asset in life is time. Time is limited, time is scarce, time can end now.   When I was young I was behaving in ways that were destroying all my efforts for success and fulfilment. I was destroying time. It was so painful to see myself doing it and despite being aware it was happening I could not stop it. It took me a long time to change, one day at the time, one step at the time, sometimes falling back to the same old behaviour, to the same old unbearable pain.  Destroying over and over again, out of guilt for not fulfilling the dreams my parents had for me, for being myself; out of fear of change, of letting go of an identity that was not mine but only a survival kit, a facade, an armour which did not fit and made me bleed.  I was very successful even when I was young but I could not see it. I could not see my creativity, my beautiful mind, my kindness, ingenuity, my love for knowledge and my dedication to justice. I could only feel not good ...

Many of us connect faith with the belief in God and cannot define faith in agnostic or atheist ways. This was a challenge for me as well and I really wanted to change this concept when I was young since being Italian culturally faith equals believing in God. So I decided to look at the word and act in it via my life with faith by taking actions not driven by fear. This was the way for me to develop faith without the need to have to believe in God. I am not saying I do not believe that there are forces in the world that are more power of me, or course there are (and many) I am saying that I find it difficult to identify one of those forces as ‘God’ since I find it easier to believe that ‘God’ is everything and that everything is ‘God’ simply because everything exists.

Even if Honesty is a universal concept and, as such, should not be subjected to interpretations, being such a wide concept it does get interpreted and, as a consequence, applied differently by people.  Its interpretation is connected with culture, family upbringing, personal ideas and values coming from previous experiences, from inner states of fears, etc… Being honest starts to examine your motives and ask yourself: "Which is the reason am I acting in a certain way or I am thinking in a certain way or, which are the motives making me feel in a certain way?" The application of the spiritual principle of honesty starts internally, it is an inside job and then it expands outward like a ripple.  Sometimes in searching for our motives we miserably fail since it is in the nature of every human being in some situations hiding a bad motive under an apparently good one.  We always need to maintain humble and question ourselves even when we feel we have the 'honest’ answer on exa...

When we speak our truth we are humble because we take a risk to be disliked, judged, sometimes even be misinterpreted. Sometimes we feel we could loose a friend, or even a family member.  By doing this we may feel feelings we do not want to feel, feeling of loss, grief, sadness, shame or guilt.  When we are feeling those feelings we become free, the more we feel those ‘negative feelings’ the more they disappear from us. Being honest and speaking our truth becomes easier and easier and the freedom becomes bigger and bigger.  We feel the bliss of freedom and we find integrity again.

Why was I a 'people pleaser' and what I was trying to avoid? How did I stop being a people pleaser? When I was young I was a people pleaser, it was the most dishonest act I could perform and it was so painful. Being a 'people pleaser' meant, firstly, being dishonest with myself: I could not say no (I could not find the courage to say no) and I was covering up my total terror of others’ opinion of me, or of their presumed rejection or dislike of me, with a 'fake personality' of being a kind, loving and caring person.  You cannot be loving and caring if you do not love yourself first. You can only fake it!  So, obviously, by being firstly dishonest with myself (in regards of the real motives of my dishonesty) I could not possibly being honest with others. Secondly by being dishonest I was actually depriving people to feel their feelings and I was manipulating their feelings towards me. I was depriving people, and especially people close to me, of their freedom to ...